Time pressure and deliberation affect moral punishment

Abstract

Abstract The deliberate-morality account implies that moral punishment should be decreased with time pressure and increased with deliberation while the intuitive-morality account predicts the opposite. In three experiments, moral punishment was examined in a simultaneous one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. The players cooperated or defected and then decided whether or not to punish their partners. In Experiment 1, the punishment decisions were made without or with time pressure. In Experiment 2, the punishment decisions were immediate or delayed by pauses in which participants deliberated their decisions. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to deliberate self-interest or fairness before deciding whether to punish their partners. Different types of punishment were distinguished using the cooperation-and-punishment model. In Experiment 1, time pressure decreased moral punishment. In Experiment 2, deliberation increased moral punishment. So far, the evidence supports the deliberate-morality account. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the effect of deliberation depends on what is deliberated. When participants deliberated self-interest rather than fairness, moral punishment was decreased. The results suggest that unguided deliberation increases moral punishment, but the effects of deliberation are modulated by the type of deliberation that takes place. These results strengthen a process-based account of punishment which offers a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific effect of deliberation on moral punishment than the deliberate-morality account.

Keywords

• Cooperation
• Punishment
• Cognitive resources
• Deliberation
• Multinomial processing tree model